Media::Consciousness::Culture::Technology

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Move over Mad Men, this is the basis of so much of your script – especially the early episodes. Actually seeing McLuhan’s early work in pop culture and communications makes this book a fantastic trip through memory lane. Mechanical Bride indeed! We are in the soup of it now, and have moved far along in the now old marriage-a-trois of mechanization, myth making and communications designed to sway the masses into a single buying machine: “They became what they beheld.” Now, so many years after publication we can see this with fresh eyes – was McLuhan the first to see what was hidden in plain sight?
We are so used to decoding these signals it seems like child’s play to us now, but it was McLuhan the consummate scholar who showed us the way to do it. Once you can see the facade you wonder why it was invisible for so long!
Maybe we need to look again at the Mechanical Bride and see her for who she really is: False Maria! (as in Metropolis or….) These folk references go very deep into our Western psyche. Essential reading.